Waltz for K.
"The dream of these pathetic renegades, seduced by cheap Western propaganda, is to uproot themselves from their native soil."
To all who were up to it—with love.
I dropped in on Nikolai Petrovich just like that, for no reason. It was a violet, vibrant evening. Spring already possessed Moscow utterly. At least the old back streets of Sretenka were tipsy with it. A girl with a spray of pussy willows ran into me right outside his house. And she herself was like the willow: her hair loose, shivering a little, peeping out from inside herself. I knocked on the dirty window—Nikolai Petrovich lived on Lukov Street, in a communal apartment, in a lop-sided little room at the end of a dull, yellow corridor. The little passage leaned sideways, the floorboards squeaked and tended to spring loose, a light bulb hung in dismal nakedness, and the place reeked of years of misery. A sour, depressing smell....
Nikolai Petrovich had a cat, an enormous coal-black monster of an animal. Lifting him down from some cupboard, Nikolai Petrovich—Kolenka, Nikusha—would say: “This cat weighs as much as an expensive black pudding.”
As I opened the door I already knew that the cat would rub his back against the bookstand, his fur crackling with Bengal lights, would wait, the rascal, to be scratched behind the ear: which was a mass of scar tissue—he was a real street fighter, this old torn.
Nikolai Petrtfvich was sitting in a pool of orange light. A dusty pre-revolutionary lampshade with tassels hung low over the table. To the uninitiated Nikolai Petrovich’s room was reminiscent of a book depository. Every square inch, except for a small island round the table and the perpetually unmade bed behind a tattered screen, was crammed with books. Of course, there was a clipboard, there were shelves, there was a broken-down and badly listing bookcase, but this was more or less normal. The trouble was, Nikolai Petrovich didn’t have enough room, and the entire floor was covered with sheaves, pyramids, towers of books. And it was through this obstacle course, stepping along a narrow path in the wake of my feline friend, that I made my way to the table. I don’t want to labor the point, but the table was a sort of scaled-down version of the room: little islands, footpaths, and all the rest taken up with papers, Babylons of letters, Bethlehems of gifts: and it was categorically forbidden to move anything. Nikolai Petrovich reached his pale thin hand to me across the table. “Hello, Okhlamonov,” he said, in his out‑of‑town accent, “would you like some tea?”
He moved with remarkable adroitness through his papyrus jungle, tucking in a shoulder so as not to displace a volume by the bootmaker Jakob Boehme that had been sticking out at an angle for the last six months, hopping over a sheaf of children’s stories by the window, and—now—plugging in an ancient hot plate, poking the element with a knife, measuring out a parsimonious mugful of water from a jug; he no longer set foot in the kitchen, he couldn’t stand it. I should say that Kolenka, Nikusha, was a melancholy or perhaps rather self-absorbed man of about thirty, a poet. Once he went into the communal kitchen for some trifle, matches, or salt, and unfortunately got into a scene—the most banal sort, where people wave their arms, trade insults, shove each other in the shoulder, and so forth. And Nikolai Petrovich, as he said later, lost an entire line. It went clean out of his head. He sat up all night over his bit of paper, but the fugitive line refused to be coaxed back. Ever since then he has made tea and boiled potatoes on the window sill in his room.
He was given the hardest time of all by women, especially women who just happened by. They would go into absolute ecstasies over his room, and invariably asked the same idiotic questions: “Where do I apply to join the library?” or words to that effect. And they would try to pull something out from right at the bottom, so that Nikolai Petrovich, turning green, would hurl himself across the room to shore up a leaning tower of oriental poetry which was just about not only to shower books on the footpath, but to topple a couple more neighboring edifices. “Ah, for God’s sake, don’t touch!” he would shout, whereupon the ladies usually desisted. They were astonished by his tone of voice: they realized then that he meant business. “I am very much afraid,” he would explain to them, “of having things moved around without my knowledge.” For Nikolai Petrovich, and this was the point, had read all these books. And knew exactly where each book was.
Raising my eyes from these lines, I see that I should perhaps apologize for a certain diffuseness, for going off the point, but the times themselves were confused, much had not yet revealed itself, and the very air was thick with “somehow or other,” with “sort of” and “as it were.” Moreover, workdays and holidays alike were riddled with machine-gun bursts of dots.... We lived in a state of not-quite-embodiment.
The water sang its brief song and was poured into the stained teapot. “Okhlamonov,” my host requested, “I beg you, do not move anything on the table.... “I was not offended. It was a ritual sentence. Only once did I pull out from under some heap of papers a small portrait of a woman with a complicated upswept coiffure and misty eyes. From her face I could tell she was not from these parts, you don’t see faces like that on our streets. I took a good long look, and that time we quarreled.
Nikolai Petrovich, lifting his feet high in the dangerous places, made his way back to the table and set the tray down in an island. Without looking he reached behind him and produced two small silver cups. The vodka was under the table. Warm, of course.... We saluted one another in silence and drank up. The cat, which knew perfectly well what was allowed and what wasn’t, sprang softly up on the table. With a sidelong glance at his master he tested the snowdrift of paper for firmness—this was allowed—showed his Turkish claws, stretched, and finally lay down. The other side of the wall somebody started strumming an out-of-tune guitar. An ambulance could be heard racing down the street. “You know, I’ve been having problems with Katenka,” said my host, “she really is too young for me. She’s out of her mind! Listen, Okhlamonov, last time she laughed so hard in bed she fell out! Right on top of Karamzin, of course! It was a nightmare, the whole history of the Russian empire came tumbling down. But that, Okhlamonov, that’s nothing.... She’s so hot-blooded! I got out of bed to put everything back in order, just as I was, of course, stark naked, and the dear crazy girl, I don’t quite know how to put it, just sort of flung herself on top of me, right on the books! Right on top of Russian history.... I thought she was fooling, but then I saw the look in her eyes, all misty and serious, biting her lip.... And then we, as it were, on top of Russian history, and she crying out the way she always does....”
Nikolai Petrovich poured some more vodka. I could not see his face. It was hidden somewhere behind the tasseled lampshade, fringed with the grey dust of many years. But the hand in its clean, threadbare cuff shook violently. “As it is I have problems with the neighbors,” my host went on, “and she knows it. How often have I asked her: ‘Katenka, couldn’t you somehow, at that last moment, restrain yourself?...’ She gets offended. Says rude words. Even weeps.... And goes right on crying out! I would try and stop her mouth, you know, with a pillow or something. But unfortunately I myself lose track completely—I get into something else altogether. And then I open my eyes and right away I know: “She did it again, she cried out!... What can you do?”—and Nikolai Petrovich began nervously tugging at his sparse beard. It was a thoroughly Chinese sort of beard, you could see right through it. Katenka I had seen a few times. The ladies who used to “happen by” had by then completely vanished. And I remember how the very first evening my heart turned over. At that time I did not yet know that she and Nikolai Petrovich shared an immortal love. What was it about her that struck me? I don’t know. One could say that everything did. She was barely sixteen, and perhaps I’ve put my finger on it: what was so striking was the combination of child-like purity and the most utter wantonness. Catching sight of me under the lampshade, I remember she said, right in front of Kolya, “Okhlamonov, do you know, I never” (that “n-e-e-ever” was her first gift, that lingering, floating “e”), “never wear anything underneath?” And like a ballet dancer she pirouetted in a clearing between Gogol and the medical encyclopedia, all brown under the flimsy little dress, no chaste strips of white to interrupt her tan.... Nikolai Petrovich sucked in his cheek as if he had a loose filling, and stared down at the table. I blushed to the eyebrows and went hot all over, so that my head spun just like that sweet little dress. “Katya,” said our host, “I ask you to desist.” And then he raised his eyes to me and added very quietly: “Okhlamonov, if she starts touching you, pay no attention. She and I share an immortal love.”